MORI chairman Bob Worcester reports on television viewing and levels of public trust of the media during the Iraq war.

BBC 1 won the terrestrial race, while Sky had a strong lead over both BBC News 24 and CNN for the digital honours.

During the heat of the battle, who do the British turn to for their news? As usual, most watched BBC1 at some time during the conflict (86 per cent), with two thirds at some time or another looking in to ITV1. These channels represented the viewing behaviour of the majority of the British public.

Around four in ten people tuned in to either, or both, of BBC 2 (41 per cent) and Channel 4 (37 per cent), with a third watching at some point either BBC News 24 (35 per cent) and/or Sky News (32 per cent). Of course BBC News 24 had the advantage of being broadcast occasionally, and late at night, on BBC1 and those viewers who were conscious of the switch would have picked up that not only had they been exposed to BBC1's news coverage, but also that of the BBC's prime digital output, running 24 hours a day.

Then lagged Channel 5 (19 per cent), and CNN (16 per cent), who had enjoyed the earlier Gulf conflict to itself, and relegated into third place for the honours of leading the digital 24 hour, wall to wall, coverage of this latest war.

Fewer than one in ten recalled seeing either Fox (five per cent) or CNBC (four per cent), while two people in one hundred found al Jazeera to their liking, or at least were curious enough to find it on their set.

When asked which news coverage they watched most since the war started, still BBC1's output took the honours, but with fewer than four in ten (38 per cent), less than half of those who'd tuned in at some point to its output. ITV1 ran a poor second with 13 per cent, but one person in ten watched most either Sky News (11 per cent) or BBC News 24 (10 per cent). Few looked to either Channel 4 (four per cent) for their coverage of the war or BBC 2 (just one per cent). Sorry, Newsnight.

But it was when the killer question was put to the nearly 1000 Brits in the heat of battle, which did they trust, that some startling figures emerged.

It's not fair to ask those who don't watch a channel if they trust it most, so taking "trust" as a percentage of those who'd watched the channel seemed to me to be the best way to measure this.

While the clear winner was still the BBC's flagship channel, BBC1, it seems Sky News - with 25 per cent of their viewers saying they trust them most compared with 17 per cent for BBC News 24's viewers - wins the runner up place, and leads the comparisons between the digital channels.